You're drunk before the world looks drunk.

Your brain starts changing long before you think it has.

Explore what alcohol does behind what you see.

Nothing here shows a crash. Every number is fitted to published measurements.

This simulation illustrates possible effects associated with alcohol impairment. Individual effects vary substantially, and BAC cannot precisely predict a person's subjective visual or cognitive experience.

Off the carriageway no collisions in this model

Simulated BAC 0.000%

0.0000.0800.1500.300

No measurable impairment Baseline performance.

What to watch

Same BAC, two states

In the car

showing sober baseline

Simulated impairment

How good they think they are 100%

How good they actually are 100%

No gap. Everything below is the baseline.

Attention / divided attention0%

Choice reaction time0%

Lane keeping (SDLP)0%

Eye movement control0%

24°useful field, at this load

+0 mschoice reaction time

rareattention lapses

1×relative crash risk

measured inferred extrapolated

Not age-adjusted. At 0.08 to 0.10%, fatal single-vehicle risk ran 11.4× for drivers 35 and older and 51.9× for male drivers 16 to 20 (Zador 2000). What this model leaves out is listed here, including why this car is not doing 100 in a 40.

In the brain

drag to turn

Circuits that changed with dose while people drove a simulator inside a scanner, at 0.05% and 0.10% (Meda 2008, n=40). In the same scanner with a second task added, anterior cingulate and dorsolateral prefrontal fell further still (Allen 2009), which is why the top region also answers to what else is going on in the car. Both studies report whether a circuit changed, not by how much, so the shading follows this model’s own channels and the pairing is ours, not theirs.

Measured in this run

lane keeping (SDLP)–published –

speed variability–published –

within 1 s of the car ahead–direction only

time to collision, car ahead–lower is worse

hazards handled in time–nothing has happened yet

Above 0.12% the model is extrapolating: controlled human dosing studies do not go this high.

Scenarios

approaching: —

This simulation illustrates possible effects associated with alcohol impairment. Individual effects vary substantially, and BAC cannot precisely predict a person's subjective visual or cognitive experience.

last checked 0.0s ago

40km/h

lane position

left–right

You're drunk before the world looks drunk.

What just happened

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